On September 3rd, the otherworldly producer Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) invited K-Dot onto an instrumental…and what ensued was a jazz-infused, psychotropic ear-blowout of a track, tailor-made for a hip hop-inclined martian.

Divergent, jewelry-store piano riffs seep through the cracks of Kendrick’s snarling of bars–a ferocity that emerges from the Compton emcee’s normally subdued style only when he’s really spitting. “I can see the darkness in me and it’s quite amazing; life and death is no mystery and I wanna taste it” is how he pulls us in for a fluent retelling of his success story. And one minute [and a dropped jaw] later, the tongue-twisted reflection is done.

…And there’s not much verbiage afterwards. What remains is pure Lotus experimentalism–drum machine spasms and a funky break of improvisational “ooh-ahh”s, mixed with just a little rhyming to spice the 3 minutes and 32 seconds up.

Kendrick teasingly claims “you will never ever catch me, no”; not him, his poetry, or his flow. But with instrumental licks that run this wild and synths looped beyond swift…we can’t even catch the beat.